Biden now waving binders around during his stump speech

posted at 7:21 pm on October 19, 2012 by Allahpundit

There’s video of this out there somewhere, I assume, but I’m not going to post it. That’s my concession to bipartisanship today: I’m not going to post a clip of this chortling oaf, who got elected running with a guy known for tut-tutting people about the smallness of their politics, turning prop comic to transform a dumb liberal Internet joke into a Serious Campaign Issue. Let’s leave the man with what little dignity he has left.

And I do mean “little”:

Vice President Joe Biden introduced a new prop into his stump speech on Friday: A binder.

Mocking Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” remark at a campaign rally in Fort Pierce, Florida, Biden held up a black binder in the air as an example of the Republican candidate’s solution to gender-based pay discrimination.

I don’t think they’re really pushing the “binders” thing to try to win back women voters. Superficially that’s the reason, but it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re a woman who stayed undecided through months of “war on women” hysteria on the left and are now tilting to Romney because you liked what he said about the economy at the debates, “binders full of women” isn’t going to pull you back over the fence. David French makes a similar point about Team O’s slightly more meaningful push lately on abortion:

1. Either the president feels the need to shore up his cultural base, or he truly thinks undecided women have been waiting to see who liked abortion the most;

2. If a Republican launched a similar base-focused blitz three weeks before the election, the MSM would see that as an unmistakable sign of trouble; and

3. The MSM likely won’t report the signs of trouble because they are in part the base that’s being reassured.

Bingo. This isn’t about women, it’s about giving the left a rattle to play with to keep them preoccupied as discouraging poll numbers flood in. Even low-information voters who watched the debates probably aren’t paying close enough attention in the aftermath to follow the “binder” nonsense. That’s a meme circulating among political junkies, not among the population at large. By name-checking it at the podium, though, Obama and Biden can show their base that they’re “on offense,” that they’re hitting Romney on the stuff that the base is interested in, and so forth. It keeps liberal activists, who are doing most of the heavy lifting for them in donations and GOTV, engaged in the process even as O’s chances at reelection tick downward. And in fairness to them, there’s not a lot else for them to talk about at this point. Lord knows, they’re not going to talk about Libya; they can kinda sorta talk about our economic “recovery,” but they’re one more bad jobs report away from having that blow up in their faces. Better just to ride along on whatever hobbyhorse the left is riding right now and hope that that guarantees maximum turnout on election day.

Blowback

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